Within a few minutes of the opening, I knew this is one of those flicks you can watch with your ears. Dhadaak, khachhaak, crrruunch, thapppadd, dhachhaak. And krrrrich, bhadaang, dhadaam. And when Boss aka Akshay Kumar decides to take a break from pulverizing bones and flashing cleavers and blowing up cars, it becomes dhinchak, dhinchak, dhinchaaak! The soundtrack is a faithful raconteur of the Boss’s (Kumar) exploits in his turn as a rowdy from Haryana, in another 'South remake’ after Rowdy Rathore. For a minute I thought I was back in Rathore land, because there were Sonakshi and Prabhudeva shaking a leg with Akshay. For all intents and purposes, this could be called Rowdy 2, because Akshay does exactly what he does in that earlier film, but with different co-stars, and a plot that is totally subservient to labelling him Boss every two minutes.

In a long flashback, we are told that the Boss wasn’t always thus. He was once a good lad who once lived in a place called Dharamkunj Gaon, whose father was a Gandhian schoolteacher named Satyakant (Chakraborty), and his younger brother was called Shiva (Pandit). “Marr gaya mere liye tu,” thunders his righteous father, after an incident in which a young boy is killed. I waited for the follow-up – “door ho ja meri nazron ke saamne se”, but alas, that one was not included.

We then move back to the present where we find Boss, the protégé of good-hearted-goon Tauji (Denzongpa), up against bad cop (Roy, good actor getting typecast) and greedy politician (Namdeo). The slate is set for the bringing together of the long-lost-but-now-discovered chhota bhai and his (the younger brother’s) curvy girl-friend (Hydari, who seems to have been hired solely for the rising-out-of-a-pool-in-bikini money shot), and estranged father and uncle (Sahni, looking lost). At each point Akshay arrives to save the day, and breaks a few bones while he is at it, all the while togged out in long kurtas and jeans and tightly-razored hair, parted in the middle.

Anthony D’Souza had directed Akshay in the execrable Blue before this, and for a while there was some scary talk of there being a sequel. Maybe Akshay on land is better than Akshay in the sea, but by very